City Of The Dead,
Street music label & mailorder

Oi! ~ Punk-Rock ~ HardCore ~ Skinhead Reggae ~ Ska
Né fascisti Né zozzoni - Neither fascists nor hippies

SHARP history

SHARP USA

SHARP was born in New York in 1987, when mass media rumours and right-wing infiltrations had ruined the orginal skin cult spreading out the image of the bonehead (just another term for 'imbecill'), the nazi and brainless 'skinhead'.

Some skins, fed up with this situation, gave life to SHARP (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice) under the slogan 'pride without prejudice' to diffuse a different message, that not all skinheads are the same and that every skinhead has got his own ideas on politics as on every other thing: being a skinhead is a style and a cultural choice, not a political one.
The first members of SHARP did a good work being interviewed at the radio and on TV and diffusing stuff to explain our multi-racial and multi-cultural roots.

SHARP UK

Finally 1989 Roddy Moreno (vocalist for Galles oi! band The Oppressed), who back then was in New York, got some antiracist skinheads' leaflets and thought that the idea was so good that it was the case to copy those flyers and to diffuse them in Europe. SHARP finally became a world wide reality.

All these things happened over ten years ago, since then many SHARP chapters disappeared and new ones were born and they still keep on coming, and every single chapter is the reflection of its own town's and country's reality, often with deep differences expecially on the political side, something that largely contributed to make SHARP members forget what this movement was born for: SHARP's purpose was to fight fascists, belonging to SHARP doesn't mean that you are non-political, anarchist or communist it just means that you're an antiracist skinhead with your own ideas, proud of your roots and not willing to be nobody's puppet.

Now, have we attained our objects? First of all today a lot of people knows that 'skinhead' doesn't stand for 'racist', and this is something more than a small advantage for our everyday life, this is an important goal in the fight against fascism: nothwithstanding the bad information and all the media publicity nazis are aware that they have lost almost a part of an important recruitment tool; beside that, lots of section gave an important contribution to the scene, creating new oi! and ska bands and publishing new fanzines, diffusin both our antiracist message and our culture, taking it back to its roots and not living it as a political instrument or as a wing of punk.

Links:

· What is SHARP: some thoughts about SHARP.

· COTD Speciale SHARP: Italian language, no longer updated.